I was really impressed by the enhancements made to the interface, the ability to search command help through a drop down, the color coded editor and of course the case insensitive SAS language (though I am not a fan of the semi colon I loved using Ctrl + / for easy commenting and uncommenting)

For a SAS turned R turned SAS coder- here are some views

SAS has different windows for coding, log and output. R generally has one

SAS is case insensitive while R is case sensitive. This is a blessing especially for variable and dataset names.

SAS deals with Datasets than can be considered the same as Rs Data Frame.

R’s flexibility in data types is not really comparable to SAS as it is quite fast enough.

SAS has a Macro Language for repeatable tasks

SQL is embedded within SAS as Proc SQL and in R through sqldf package

You have to pay for each upgrade in SAS ecosystem. I am not clear on the transparent pricing, which components does what and whether they have a cloud option for renting by the hour. How about one web page that lists product description and price.

SAS University Edition is a OS agnostic tool, for that itself it is quite impressive compared to say Academic Edition of Revolution Analytics.

R is object oriented and uses [] and $ notation for sub objects. SAS is divided into two main parts- data and proc steps, and uses the . notation and var system

SAS language has a few basic procs but many many options.

How good a SAS coder you are often depends on what you can do in data manipulation in SAS Data Step

Graphics is still better in R ggplot. But the SAS speed is thrilling.

RAM is limited in the University Edition to 1 GB but I found that still quite fast. However I can upload only a 10 mb file to the SAS Studio for University Edition which I found reasonable for teaching purposes.

4 thoughts on “SAS for R Users”

Thanks for sharing your experience. Your list of 14 comments is interesting. As an R user, you might be interested in knowing that PROC IML (the SAS interactive matrix language) is included as part of the SAS University Edition. You might find the SAS/IML language useful when you want to write code that extends the capabilities of SAS. I wrote a blog post on “10 tips for learning the SAS/IML language” that might interest you: http://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2014/08/11/ten-tips-for-learning-sasiml/